


reiterate

by krebkrebkreb



Series: recursive [3]
Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst and Feels, Asexuality Spectrum, Character Study, F/M, Far Too Many Parentheticals, Guilt, Introspection, Memory Loss, POV The Doctor (Doctor Who), Telepathy, Temporary Character Death - Jack Harkness
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-18
Updated: 2021-03-18
Packaged: 2021-03-27 00:28:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,600
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30114363
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/krebkrebkreb/pseuds/krebkrebkreb
Summary: The Doctor inevitably and irreparably ruins the people around her.(The TARDIS would like the Doctor to stop feeling guilty for being loved and go take a nap. The Doctor very stubbornly does the opposite.)(A companion to the ending of "iterate".)
Relationships: Thirteenth Doctor/Jack Harkness
Series: recursive [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2209011
Comments: 6
Kudos: 13





	reiterate

**Author's Note:**

> I made some very, very minor dialogue changes to the ending of "iterate" to match what they say here. If you read that after this was posted (18 Mar 21) then everything is the same!

Jack Harkness is dead on the floor of her TARDIS and it is entirely the Doctor’s fault.

The TARDIS is now safely in the vortex and away from the mess she made of Gallifrey (again) and the collapsing Matrix Chamber. This leaves the Doctor with nothing to do but watch Yaz on her knees beside Jack as she attempts chest compressions on his corpse.

Right away, as soon as Jack collapsed, Yaz was there checking his pulse and tilting his head back to clear his airway. Kind and wonderful Yaz, always trying to help. This just isn’t something anyone can help with. 

“You can stop,” the Doctor says to her. The brightness that is the wrongness of Jack’s continued existence hasn’t faded, doesn’t fade. He’s going to come back. He’s going to be fine. 

(He _is_ going to be fine, isn’t he? He wouldn’t leave her alone, would he?)

Yaz doesn’t stop at all, continues trying so hard to save a man who cannot truly die. “I thought he said he’s immortal! I thought _you_ said he’s immortal!”

This is too much. This, after all of the emotional turmoil she experienced in the Matrix, is suddenly more than the Doctor can bear.

“It’s not instant, Yaz!” Immediately, she feels terrible for shouting. The expression on Yaz’s face as she finally (thankfully) ceases her actions and looks at the Doctor could almost be described as wounded; even generously, it’s still one of surprise and hurt. “I’m—I’m sorry. I know you’re only trying to help, but that could be hurting him.” Broken ribs are just one more thing to heal.

“How can you just stand there and not try?”

With _great_ difficulty, the Doctor wants to say. It’s a struggle every time because turning off her impulse to help and stepping back is never, ever easy. But she has to. “I can feel his timeline. It’s there, on the edge of my brain, and it’s a fixed point. He’ll be fine.”

Yaz is quiet for a moment, digesting that information. “Jack said you called him wrong.”

Ah. Of course Jack had said that. The Doctor shakes her head sadly. “He is wrong. It’s unnatural. He shouldn’t exist.”

“But you let him travel with you,” Yaz says.

The Doctor feels her face screw up into something of an unpleasant, unhappy expression. ( _So_ expressive, this face. She misses the ineffable eyebrows. She misses caring less about being so socially awkward.) “It’s complicated,” she says.

Yaz gets to her feet and folds her arms across her chest. “That’s exactly what he told me, but the more I think on it the less complicated it really seems.”

There is a tense, quiet pause. Does it really seem uncomplicated to Yaz? Her feelings for Jack have ever been a confusing, complex tangle; just comparing the reasons she has for inviting him to travel with her again with all the reasons it was a bad idea could fill an entire book. 

“You love him,” Yaz says. It sounds to the Doctor like an accusation, though she cannot figure out why.

“That’s not the point here.” It would really be quite wonderful if they could stop talking about this before Jack wakes up. “Can you help me get him into the infirmary? I’d like to do some scans.”

(She’d like to figure out exactly how she killed her friend.)

  
  


The TARDIS does _not_ seem to want them in the infirmary. Jack is laid out on the floor again as the Doctor bangs on the door. Normally it swings open without so much as a latch to get in the way. The way, but now it remains firmly closed.

“Come on,” she says. Oh, she really doesn’t want to have to resort to begging. Not in front of Yaz.

Yaz reaches past her to jiggle the handle. “I don’t remember this door even closing properly before.”

“It _doesn’t_ usually. Infirmary is a room you’ve got to be able to get in quick.” The Doctor grunts with effort as she tries to shove it open with her shoulder. “ _Please_ let us in. Just for some quick scans, then we’ll be right out. Promise.”

The door doesn’t budge. 

“Why not just take him to his room?” Yaz asks. ”You can run scans after.”

It’s a valid suggestion to make, but not one that the Doctor likes very much. She _can_ run scans after, but she’s also pretty sure they won’t show anything once he’s healed. She’s also not so sure she wants Yaz to see all of the history that Jack keeps in his room, but she can’t carry him alone.

The Doctor takes a breath, trying to prepare herself for all the questions she knows Yaz will want to ask. “Yeah,” she says, “we can do that.”

Jack has only been dead for about four minutes, not nearly enough time for him to start growing stiff. It’s awkward nonetheless for the two of them to lift and carry down the hall, Yaz with his feet and the Doctor with her arms hooked beneath his. He’s bulky and tall and his hair tickles her nose.

He still smells good. Still smells like Jack, warm and comforting and a little bit spicy and a little bit like something that shouldn’t exist. It’s wonderful and reassuring, but it’s also a little bit awful to be comforted this way by a dead thing.

“He could hurry a bit with waking up,” Yaz grumbles. The Doctor definitely agrees; her awareness of his _wrongness_ is only growing.

Very much unlike the infirmary, the door to Jack’s room opens without anyone even touching it. It also is about two dozen yards and several turns closer than it used to be.

I get the message, she thinks towards the TARDIS, but I certainly don’t understand it. She feels something like an apology in reply, and also quite a lot of concern. She doesn’t know if the concern is for her or for Jack and the old girl doesn’t seem much like elaborating.

Once they have Jack on the bed, Yaz glances around. Her eyes settle on the polaroid photograph in its place of honor on his nightstand and the Doctor counts down in her head: Three… Two…

“Who’re these people with Jack?” Yaz asks. “His family?”

The photo—of Jack and Rose and her ninth (tenth? hundredth?) self—might as well be Jack and his family. A small part of his family, anyway. It is simultaneously one of her favorite things in here and one of the worst things she can’t make herself stop looking at. Her memory is brilliant but it’s different to see something in living color right in front of her. The color of Rose’s eyes, the sparkle of her smile… memory doesn’t quite do that justice.

“That’s Rose and me,” the Doctor says. Rose’s name comes first because Rose is the one who really deserves to be remembered. This past self of hers… he wasn’t one who always made good decisions.

(He was the one who took Rose to witness the destruction of Earth so that he wouldn’t have to be the only one to bear the pain of watching their world burn.)

(He was the one who left Jack without so much as an explanation.)

“Don’t look like a white-haired Scotsman here.”

That startles the Doctor into smiling. “I wondered if you remembered me saying that. I’ve had to change my face a lot.” (Too many times.) “Been more than the Scotsman.”

“You’ve almost died _a lot_?”

Oh, Yaz. If only it were ‘almost’.

“I almost die pretty often,” the Doctor says. Nearly every adventure they go on, she’s in a situation where she almost dies. “I _have_ died a lot. Maybe not as many times as Jack here, but you don’t regenerate unless there’s no other way to survive.”

(She remembers telling Grace how frightening it is, that moment you’re sure you’re about to die before you’re born again. She hadn’t told Grace how _sad_ it always is too, having to say goodbye to who you used to be.)

(The Doctor would like to remain _this_ Doctor—this kind, compassionate, forgiving person she is right now—for a good while longer yet.)

She takes advantage of Yaz’s silence to change the subject. “I’m going to sit with him until he wakes back up. You can go to bed if you’d like; I know it’s been a long day for humans.”

Yaz, the brilliant (merciful) woman that she is, takes the dismissal with grace.

  
  


It takes long enough for Jack to wake up that the Doctor has a lot of time (too much time) to think.

“You are too nice to me, Jack. Always far too nice,” the Doctor says even though he cannot hear her. “I could use a little bit of that now though, I think. You could be nice to me by coming back right quick.”

Nothing. There is no response because of course there is no response because he is dead. 

(Because she killed him.)

Some people say the peaceful dead look asleep, but those people have likely never been close to a dead body. Jack is very clearly _not_ sleeping. His skin is ashy and pale, his limbs are cold, and he is _still_. He is terribly still.

There’s this really wonderful thing about humans where they are all always moving at least a little bit. Shifting their weight from foot to foot, subconsciously stretching muscles, scratching itches, looking around. Even asleep they breathe and twitch and dream. So many other species have truly mastered the art of being still, but not humans. The Doctor would (fondly, always fondly) call them restless.

(Fondly, because she is well aware it is her own restlessness that draws her to these restless human beings. The thundering move-do, move-do of her hearts. Humans have built so much because they never stop _doing_.)

This corpse that Jack Harkness needs to hurry up and inhabit again… It’s not restless. It is limp and upsetting.

“It would be _very_ nice if you came back now.”

This isn’t the first time she’s seen him die. Of course it’s not. It isn’t even the first time she’s seen him die for her. It is the first, however, where she has known something was very likely to kill him and done it anyway.

That their missing memories might have been related was a very convenient excuse to do what she had done. All those memories she herself has removed, everyone who has begged her not to do it even as she pressed her fingers to their temples… Maybe, she had thought, maybe this time she can bring some _back_.

(It’s always supposed to be for their own good when she takes a memory away, but then isn’t that often the case with some of the worst mistakes?)

She knew that the Matrix would fry Jack’s brain. Even if it hadn’t reacted so poorly to the presence of a fixed point inside it he’s only human. Even with the little bit of psychic abilities humanity had begun to develop by the time he was born, he is nothing like a Time Lord.

It had been immensely difficult to keep him in there as long as she did. Yes she had told him not to distract her, but the real reason things kept turning into everything she was trying to avoid thinking was mostly that it was horribly difficult to convince the Matrix to have anything to do with him and his brain. It was a lot of effort, a nearly impossible amount of effort, just to keep them both in there and bear the strain it had been putting on his brain as well as hers.

The Doctor truly hadn’t recognized the place that very young Jack had been taken to on Gallifrey, but she had recognized the man he had been with. Short hair, dark skin, looking confident but still slightly scared... He was older than the first time she saw him, but he was _her_ : the last her that she watched regenerate inside the Matrix, the same version of herself she watched join the division in that half-deleted moment. 

That thought, the reminder of how fragile the Matrix can really be, leads to the horrible thought about just exactly what she’s _done_. 

The instability she created with Jack likely destroyed so much of the precious, irreplaceable knowledge inside the Matrix. Gallifrey itself is likely physically safe—the star powering the planet is too well protected and too stable to be ruined by a little earthquake—but the world still turning is a paltry consolation in the face of the tragedy of this loss she has caused.

An entire civilization erased by the actions of one person.

(Add another one to your list, Doctor, she tells herself. This one bigger and harsher and harder than most of the rest.)

  
  


She’s so caught up in her own head that Jack speaking to her is the first sign she gets that he’s back. 

“What’s got you so glum, beautiful?”

The Doctor drops her hands from her head and looks up and oh, finally, he is _there_. There and awake and smiling and looking as alive as ever. His clothes are a bit rumpled and his hair is sticking up at odd angles in the back and he is _there_.

“Jack!” She feels for just a fraction of an instant the way she did upon seeing him in the prison: Disbelief, mixed with the realization _of course_. “You shouldn’t be moving yet. You were out for”—too long, far too long—“ a while.”

“It takes a bit longer these days, but I still reset fully after I die. I’m _fine_.”

(Yes, but _she_ is not fine. Not right now.)

“The infirmary didn’t want to let me in with you,” she tells him, unhappy with how her voice wavers. It’s easier to say than anything else she wants to.

“Maybe that’s because the TARDIS knew I didn’t need the infirmary. It didn’t want you to worry.” If she knew him less well, she might only hear the reassurance in his tone and not the concern. 

“Maybe.” (No. Probably not.) “You should still rest.”

He stares at her for an eternity of a second, searching her face. “Do you want me to leave?”

_What?_ No no, they are not doing this. Not right now. Even if he wants to leave, she… no, please. Not right now. “You must not be as fine as you say you are because leaving is the opposite of the resting I just suggested you do.”

“The TARDIS, Doctor,” Jack says. “Do you want me to leave the TARDIS?” His voice is a horrible mix of patient and frightened.

Oh, she really does not want to be having this conversation right now. Not after today.

“What?” she asks, trying to put confusion into her face. Her nose scrunches up, her eyes widen a bit… It’s convincing, she thinks, in a way that she hopes will lead him to believing that his leaving has not crossed her mind.

(It really hasn’t.)

It’s probably too convincing because he goes on to actually _explain_. 

“I’m _wrong_ ,” Jack says, a perfect mirror of the first time she said it to him at the end of the universe. “I’m so wrong a big collective consciousness of Time Lord memory didn’t want me anywhere near it. I’ll understand if that’s made you reconsider things.”

He thinks she doesn’t know that? That she didn’t know it before taking him to Gallifrey? She shakes her head. If they’re doing this, she supposes, they might as well do it all the way. No sense in having only half of the important parts of this conversation. “I’m not going to run away because of that, and I’m not going to run away just because you know something about me I wish you didn’t.”

(She is so, so good at running. Opening up is so very much harder.)

A complicated expression flickers across his face, surprise and disbelief and maybe guilt. That’s fair, she thinks, after the way she’s behaved and the way he pushed for answers to questions she didn’t want asked, but she cannot keep looking at it. Not when it only compounds the guilt _she_ feels.

So she looks away from his face, and she tells him: “You were right, what you were thinking in the Matrix. I did need to have someone else know.” He was right too in thinking that she probably couldn’t ever say it out loud. Not to someone like Jack who would actually understand the immensity of what the admission meant.

“ _I_ killed you today, Jack.” Very literally, with her hands on the sides of his face, knowing full well what was likely to happen. How can he keep looking at her like she’s done nothing wrong? Like he wants her _approval_? “I’m why you died. If we hadn’t gone there…”

“I’ll always come back.” The words are a forgiveness, and more than she deserves.

(Oh, how guilty that makes her feel.)

“I know,” she says. “So stay. Please stay.” On board the TARDIS. In her life. In the universe. Just stay. Even if she continues to make these mistakes, even though she _will_ continue to make mistakes, please stay. She can’t lose him now that he _knows_.

The Doctor can feel his gaze on her, how he’s searching her face. Trying to figure out what’s going on. She wants him to know how serious she is, so she looks up and meets his eyes.

He nods. “I’ll stay.”

Her hearts choke up in her chest, full of love and relief and hope and love. Mostly love. A lot of love. 

“I would really like to kiss you now. If that’s okay with you.” Her voice is quiet. She hopes that he will understand what she’s offering. Just after breaking her free from prison, he had asked her the same thing in nearly the same words. She had denied him, practically ran away. Here’s his chance to do the same, to put some distance back between them. If it’s what he wants.

He doesn’t, it seems. It isn’t.

“I would like that very much, Doctor,” he says.

Once she’s on her knees on the bed beside him, the task of getting past how terribly unworthy she is of being allowed this by a man she’s just murdered suddenly seems insurmountable. Good thing her brain works fast and has never let her believe in the impossible being truly impossible: it’s barely a moment before she’s settling down where she wants to be in his lap. 

Kissing Jack Harkness is lovely, now that she’s given herself the opportunity to get used to it. He is warm and solid, and just difficult enough to be near that she knows this is _real_. Not even a mind like hers could dream up the existence of something so impossible and broken as Jack.

It’s been several hundred years and an entire version of herself since she was someone who liked touch and kissing quite so much. This need to hug and hold and be hugged and be held is something her prior self absolutely did not feel. 

River, bless her, had understood. Twenty-four years of night on Derillium and only once did she ask for a more intensely physical act of intimacy than a practically chaste kiss with any seriousness. Denying any kind of affection to the woman who had for so long thought the Doctor not in love with her had been a difficult but necessary thing, but River had seen that denial for the act of trust it was.

I love you enough to set boundaries so that you won't accidentally hurt me, the Doctor had meant. I know you well enough to respect them without question, River’s acceptance had answered.

And now she’s this. A person who sometimes wants to be close enough to someone to feel their warmth and touch their skin and be not alone.This is, she thinks, probably possible for her now _because_ of River—because of all the loveand patience she had been so selflessly given.

River would have been happy, if she knew that it was Jack Harkness who was helping her become comfortable with touch again. Their fights about how the Doctor had treated him had not been a one- or even several-time occurrence. River, even with her own inborn time sense, had never found him as unpleasant an anomaly.

(How much of that abrasive discomfort she used to feel, the Doctor wonders now, was born out of guilt and not biology?)

At some point during all of this, his coat has been pushed off his shoulders and down his arms. He shrugs his hands free and tangles strong fingers into her hair and they _both_ make quiet, happy noises. 

Oh, they really should talk about this before he gets the wrong idea.

The Doctor realizes that she’s thinking about it—the conversation she will need to soon have with him about physicality and contact and her very real boundaries—loudly and intently enough that he can probably skim her intention to talk right off the surface of her mind. Kissing him while so very worn out continues to be a bit of a mistake.

(It is worth it, however. It is very worth it.)

(When she invites herself into his bed again, intent on sleeping off this exhaustion beside the comfort of a body warmer than hers, that difficult bit if vulnerability is worth it too.)

**Author's Note:**

> Repetition may be the theme of this series, but I sort of feel as though my high school English teachers are going to pop up behind me and give a lecture about economy of words.
> 
> Part 4 is in the works, but it is much longer and definitely will not be posted as quickly as this one was.
> 
> I can be found on twitter as @krebshouting if you'd like to see the occasional little snippets of what I'm working on next.


End file.
